Help Jesse recover & get a Degree

Hi - my name is Jesse Noller, and I am asking for your help to recover from the shutdown of my business/livelihood - The Humble Fungus. The loss of the business has left me totally bankrupt, requiring legal, financial and other paid specialists.

After leaving tech, I invested every dime, moment of time and ounce of energy into Humble, mushroom cultivation, mycology, the community, education and writing. Now, as I rebuild, I'm leaning into my strengths - education, analysis, teaching, fieldwork and more. But, most importantly, I have the opportunity to achieve a life-long dream of finishing my degree(s).

Your support will go to:

Below is the complete statement, which you can also read here.

"It is with great sadness and disappointment that I have to announce that effective immediately (8-15-22), The Humble Fungus is ceasing all operations. We no longer have the funding to continue and have lost our space.

All remaining orders have been refunded or fulfilled.

Once the bankruptcy and other legal matters are settled, I will be placing the Applied Mycology book on a domain, sending out updates to those that ordered.

If you have questions about this, please email [email redacted]

As this has left the company and me in complete bankruptcy, I am currently looking for new jobs/consulting opportunities; I invested mind, body, soul and every dollar into Humble Fungus and am effectively destitute.

I am truly and sincerely sorry and ashamed for having let you all down; I know that businesses fail, and this is not "me" ending, but having put all of me into this, it will take time to recover."

"I know this will shock many of you; I try to put on a happy, confident face, but Humble has struggled for some time, and the fault solely rests on my shoulders. When I started Humble back in 2019, it was deceptively easy for me to grow/scale and take on more work to expand the business. Going from a room in a house to a commercial space in 6 months makes it seem like anything is possible, and all you have to do is work hard.

In reality, after my suicide attempt in late 2020, when I returned to a massive backlog of orders and everything contaminated/dead/failed, I should have stopped then to re-assess what I was doing (and doing to myself). Not only that, but coming out of a week-long coma, my lifelong companion Churchill (pug) had crippling diabetes and promptly went blind.

The dream of Humble and my drive to make it a beacon in the community and push the boundaries became the one thing I had to hold on to. It became something that I could not ever fail at because no matter how small the failure, it was my fault, and I just had to push myself harder.

My mistakes and failures will take time to truly unpack and examine - falling into constant over-promising and under-delivering (because all I have to do to fix it is go harder). Not taking time to work on and heal myself, no vacations, no breaks. What's worse is that this sets the tone and pace of the people who help me, which is unconscionable in any realm.

Betting on dreams is tough. You get blinded to reality, and survivor's bias and sunk cost fallacy take control. You realize you’ve dug a hole, but you say to yourself, “if I keep digging, that’ll fix it."

In truth, I scaled too fast, spread myself too thin and when I was out of gas? Just pushed harder and ignored my doctors and friends trying to push through everything. I trust far too quickly - and I trusted the wrong people early on just to keep things alive and because I blamed myself and needed any help from any source.

Now, the debt from all of that has come home to roost - I’ve spent the past month trying everything, saving throw, loans, tricks etc., to make things keep going, but I can physically and mentally no longer keep going this way. I burned out a bit ago, and that, plus the depression, stress, anxiety and self-loathing, made everything from basic living and friendships impossible.

Sadly, I don’t feel as if I’m leaving behind a net-positive impact - instead, I’m leaving a smoking crater of broken promises and heady goals. I’ve been pulling further back, unable even to help people because I feel like an absolute sham and failure.

I have no plans for the future at this time and no jobs lined up; I'm sorry I let you down.

I believe in all of you - I know you can grow, cultivate and study mushrooms, you have the passion, and even if you fail once, you can keep going and learning. Your passion for science, mushrooms and fungi has kept me going through all the pain and mistakes.

Thank you for everything; you’ll never know just how much it’s meant to me.

Never lose you.